Wild Decembers (15 page)

“It’s concocted evidence.”

“You mean you did not assault that unfortunate man on the night of the eleventh instant at about 10:35?”

“He asked for it . . . Handing me back a cheque in front of everyone. . . ‘I return your cheque uncashed.’”

“Apparently it was not enough . . . He lifted stones with his machine, he harrowed and seeded your field to grow turnips. . .”

“The seeds were mine, they were my seeds. All he did was lift the stones and spread manure on the field.”

“That was a lot of work.”

“He owed it to me . . . He parked his tractor in our yard. He could take timber whenever he wanted. My sister spoilt him with cakes and things.”

“Let us keep to the point . . . He harrowed your field.”

“He dragged a bush over it.”

“Mr. Brennan, do you deny that all was palsy-walsy between you until he rented the grazing of certain lands?”

“He stole them.”

“You seem to have a grudge against this man.”

“His tractor is driving us mad . . . At all hours. Droning . . . Droning. It’s destroying the hedges. It’s stopping the birds singing. They don’t sing so sweetly any more . . . As for the roads . . . they were not made for a machine like that. He’s wearing them down.”

“You speak as though the roads were yours.”

“They’re more mine than his . . . My family were the first in Cloontha. We’ve been there for ever . . . His were Buglers from Wales. They followed the soldiers playing bugles . . . That’s why people call them buglers, in case you didn’t know.”

Breege turned to this one and that, her face full of apprehension, fear in her eyes. O’Dea had been called out, and the only one to meet her gaze was Guard Slattery, who looked at her, peeved. Bugler sat stiffly with his head down.

“Is his dog Welsh?” the judge asked, with a note of mockery which was lost on Joseph.

“He’s a nothing dog . . . A mongrel. I would never pick a male dog. I always pick bitches . . . They’re more intelligent. They have a protrusion on the crown of the head that proves it.”

“My, my, you are a scholar.”

“I try, your honour.”

“You could have settled this row, you could have gone up to your neighbour or met him somewhere and said, ‘Let’s shake on it,’ you could have atoned.”

“Not if you paid me. Not for all the wealth that freighted into Orchomenus even into Thebes, Egyptian Thebes.”

“A scholar?”

“The Greeks, your honour,” and feeling now that the judge was partial to this erudition, he began to spout, regardless of the laughter that was beginning to splutter out from the visitors’ seats.

“Zeus, King, give me revenge. . .”

“You have lost me.”

“The husband of Helen getting his own back on Paris. . .”

“Why are you wasting my time. What is a small farmer like you doing spouting this rubbish. You’re a bog-trotter.”

“You’re an ignorant man, if I may say so.”

“Do I hear correctly?” the judge asked, and his colour was beginning to change.

“Making little of me just because you’re up there . . . A jumped-up grocer’s son . . . I’ve looked you up in the records.”

The judge’s face reddened, purpled as he half rose from his seat. At that moment, O’Dea ran from the doorway towards the bench waving his hand with a pen in it. “Your honour, I wish to apologise.”

“I have rarely seen a more reckless witness.”

“Correct. But, your honour, imagine having to defend a man like that . . . Just put yourself in my shoes.”

“Your client is drunk.”

“Not really drunk, your honour. Maybe he had one or two.”

“Do you expect me to fall for that?”

“I am begging you to hold your fire . . . I mean, take the chastised Picasso.”

“Picasso,” the judge said, and looked around as if he was in the company of raving inmates.

“Yes, Picasso. He painted a lot of doves in the last year of his life, but because he was a Communist the public would not buy his doves. Even the Kremlin refused.”

“Mr. O’Dea, I am not getting your drift.”

“Your honour, people can change . . . Picasso changed. My client could, as you put it, atone for what he did.”

“He’s a head case.”

“He didn’t mean if . . . It’s in the genes. The family were all the same. A kink . . . The mother used to walk the roads in the moonlight . . . Up and down.”

It was too much for Joseph. He rose now, kicked and stomped with his new boots, shouting out that his mother was a lady to whom present company could not hold a candle.

The judge rose, his voice quaking with anger, his jaw bull-like and booming out the sentence as his fist hit the bench with the force of a gavel: “I am sending you for fourteen days to Limerick County Gaol.”

“Your honour,” O’Dea begged.

“Contempt of court and contempt of person.”

“It’s Christmas, your honour . . . It’ll break hearts.”

“Court adjourned,” the judge said, and hurried behind a folding screen with the clerk following and picking up documents which were strewn in his wake. The bit of floor which his gown had swept clean emphasised the biding dust on either side.

“In Jesus’ name, Joseph,” O’Dea said, making a gross and violent swipe at the reporters who had converged around them.

“He rubbed me the wrong way,” Joseph said.

“You blew it . . . Zeus, Thebes. Feck.”

Bugler was standing and looking across at them as if he might come over. Breege, still sitting, kept her head down.

“Will he go to gaol?” she asked, like someone coming awake from anaesthesia.

“I’ll go down to the hotel and see if I can get a word with the judge.”

“I don’t want his blasted pity,” Joseph said.

“Muzzle him,” O’Dea said, hurrying off, biting his pen as if it were a liquorice stick.

By the time they came out, everyone had gone, including Bugler. The grounds were deserted, only the seagulls stormed the sky, which was now packed with thick muttony cloud. It was a busy town, people hurrying to lunch and blowing their hooters, either in friendly or vindictive fashion. They began to walk. They were together and not together. She knew that if she spoke a single word he would explode right there in front of people. When he stopped to look at something she walked on, and when she stopped he did the same. From the cake shops there was a smell of warm bread and the meringues in the window were spewing apart, their insides a frail pink. In the butcher’s shop window prices of the different cuts of beef and mutton were chalked up and a little row of toy lambs was placed along the sill. From a loudspeaker a man kept urging people to give blood and gave the location of the caravan beside the monument at the top of the town. A shop window full of new shirts had ties done up around them.

In the chapel he stood beside her and she could feel his agitation. Behind the sconce of lit candles and spluttery flame there was a prayer printed in red and gold ornamental lettering:

May this candle be a light for you to enlighten me in my difficulties and decisions.

May it be a fire for you to burn out of me all pride, selfishness, and impurity.

May it be a flame to bring warmth into my heart towards my family, my neighbours, and all those in need.

I cannot stay for long, but I wish to give you something of myself.

Help me to continue my prayer.

They walked through side streets, then a tiny alley that led them down to the river. On the solid stone bridge there were hanging baskets with moss and flowers, their metal braziers thudding back and forth. The water was a dark brown, and just beneath it, lifelike torsos of seaweed that moved and slithered like belly dancers. A woman with two small children was also studying the water, telling her children how it was full of bugs and worms for the fish to feed on.

“We better not be late,” Breege says.

“If I go to gaol, who’ll mind you?”

“We better not be late,” she says again.

He looks at her, his face chastened, his blue eyes watery behind his fogged lenses, and she realises that he has been crying.

O’Dea was waiting for them on the steps. By the way he waved and his satisfied smile they knew Something had changed.

“You’re a lucky man . . . Bugler has decided to drop the case.”

“Now why would he do a thing like that?”

“Jesus wept . . . You should be down on your knees,” O’Dea said; then, taking Breege’s arm, linked her jauntily down the steep, imposing flight of steps.

T
HROUGH THE LONG
drizzling afternoon and evening they sat, light rain on the courtyard outside dropping onto the tubs of ivy with floodlights stuck in among them, and as it grew darker neon strips came on in the office windows across the way. Joseph and O’Dea drinking quietly, happily. O’Dea teasing his client now, saying how he nearly hung himself, getting the judge’s gander up like that.

“I wouldn’t have minded going to gaol.”

“In with city gurriers . . . you wouldn’t have stuck it,” O’Dea said, and laughed, urging Breege to have a little drop of port wine and to take her coat off or she’d bake in the heat of the fire.

Bugler is a few tables away with two strangers, but she has not looked in his direction, she is too ashamed to.

“Faith, you were maladroit in the box,” O’Dea said, still laughing. He is in his element, what with the warmth of the room, the drawn velvet curtains, a red plush like theatre curtains, the smell of turf smoke, and the faint sound of sods shifting themselves in the heat. He has launched into the stories that he tells so often, relaying them now again for Breege and Joseph because he can see how nervous, how strangled they look in that grand room and the antagonist only a few feet away. The drink makes him expansive, reminiscences flowing from him as, turning from time to time to compliment Breege, he says, “You are excessively sensitive and excessively petite.”

“You’ve seen a lot of life, a lot of human nature,” Joseph says sagely.

“I’ve seen a lot of folly,” O’Dea says, sits back in the chair, stares into the fire, and then it is the parable of Brady versus Bonner, two unhappy families on either side of the stream.

“It was thus,” he said, his voice pitched higher for others to hear. “There was the Bradys and the Bonners with a river between them but no bridge, Brady having to carry his women and his children when the floods came. So it was a question of trying to get Bonner to agree to a bridge, but he wouldn’t budge. The case going to a first court, a second court, a third court, an all-day sitting ending in the upstairs room of the local hotel; teams of solicitors, teams of barristers, warring engineers, and in the middle of the sitting the high court judge having to be wined and dined because of his status. Messages going to and fro, agreement almost, maps, opes, red lines, blue lines, the seal about to be stamped on it when old Mrs. Bonner stands up and says they are being rooked, ground is being taken from them on their side of the river. She storms out, the Bradys follow, cars tearing up a country road, and at midnight a settlement reached under the stars. Handshakes all around, until the next day or the next week when neither party would pay costs, each considering themselves to be the winner and not the loser. Litigation starting up all over again.”

He ceased and laughed, bemused, into his tumbler of whiskey, declared there was a mischief in it from day one; that they were never meant to be friends.

“That could be us,” Breege said nervously.

“You are excessively sensitive and excessively petite,” he said for the second time.

Looking at Breege then, he helped her out of her coat and warned her, “My good girl, never marry . . . Whatever you do, don’t, don’t marry.”

“You married young,” Joseph says.

“Too young . . . met her on a balcony.”

Turning to Breege, he said he would make her laugh. He didn’t like to see such a melancholy expression, he would amuse her with the story of Flanagan, the horse who was able to pick locks with his pronged teeth.

“A judge beyond in Tipperary got promoted to a court not far from here. In due course he sent for his favourite Flanagan so that he could ride him. Flanagan and a mare were put on a train, arrived at his gateway, and were put in a field next to the road. Well, Flanagan doesn’t care for the new surroundings, so he gets his teeth to work all night, and the following morning it’s down to the railway station whence he had come the night before; clogs into the ticket office, terrifies the stationmaster’s wife, who is putting in her teeth, takes a counter with him, floats over two filing cabinets to a back passage, and with the Flanagan nose for a level crossing leaps to the place where he had dismounted the previous evening. No oncoming train. So it’s over a half-door into a waiting room, chairs and benches keeled over, a glass window broken, Flanagan now going berserk on account of being trapped in an enclosed room, and men too frightened to go near him manage only to quell his assaults by feeding him and his missus buckets of oats. Next night same scenario. Flanagan and the mare are turned back and a rope put on the gate. Flanagan in the fullness of time masters how to undo knots. Nothing for it but a padlock. Well, the padlock is put on the gate and our judge sleeps sound until he is alerted to the fact that Flanagan and the mare are out on the main road again causing pandemonium. Down to the gate. He mooches around to find the lock and the key flung into the grass. He had the bad luck to share an avenue, a causeway, with a Mrs. Boyce, a returned Yank whose vernacular principally included the words ‘Oh gee’ or ‘I’m thinking of making a killing.’ Over he goes to her, but oh gee, the subject of the lock is not interesting to her, all she wishes to know is the price of steer so that she can make a killing. He asks how the lock got there. Oh gee, it’s a mystery. Moreover, he did not have the right to put a lock on the gate. It belongs to her. She had it made, she had the piers put down, and she has the receipts for same. He tries to reason with her, says if the Lord Himself built a gate, the purpose of it is to keep animals in check. Oh gee, she agrees, but a lock-eating horse belongs in a circus and not in a field. He says it was not Flanagan who threw the lock and key away, that much is certain. Oh gee, another thing is certain. She is not in favour of a lock. It will slow things up for Paud going in and out. Could Paud be persuaded to suffer the nuisance of opening a little lock? Oh gee, she doubted that. A lock was not going to bite him, and if an animal got out on the road and killed someone, it could be manslaughter, it could be trouble for everyone. She would think it over. Same scenario. A new lock thrown into the high grass. The judge decides on a fence to keep his Flanagan in. Oh gee, a fence is no good. A fence is cutting a slice out of their side of the avenue. Paud sits on the gate and stops the workmen coming in. More letters. An injunction. Circuit court, district court, high court, and Flanagan having to be sent away, and on her deathbed, Oh gee, Ma Boyce proud of one thing, that they beat the judge.”